About

14 October 2016

Speech by An Tánaiste and Minister for Justice and Equality Frances Fitzgerald TD at the London School of Economics Irish Alumni Dinner Dublin, 14th October 2016

"Today I believe as strongly as I did during those days in London that the state should stand for social justice and for equality of opportunity"Speech by
An Tánaiste and Minister for Justice and Equality

Frances Fitzgerald TD at the London School of
Economics Irish Alumni Dinner

Dublin, 14th October 2016

Friends,

I’m not a great one
for looking back. But when considering what I would talk to you about I, again
and again, thought about by time at the LSE and also the time before and since.

So if you’ll indulge
me, tonight I will speak a little bit about my early career and how that has
informed my views on the challenges we face today, as well as the ones we could
face in the days ahead.

The period I spent at
the LSE was a very formative one in my life.

So many of the things
that happened since, opportunities that came my way and the views I now hold,
can be linked back to those years in London in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Good academic
training, combined with the people I met and worked with, and the causes I
became involved in, opened up my world.

My masters was in
Social Administration and Social Work and my thesis was on school attendance, a
problem that I would deal with again and again over the course of my career.

After I graduated I
spent a few years working in London with group of around 20 social workers.
They were from different backgrounds and had very different views and
perspectives on the world and the work we did. I suppose you could call them
edgy, maybe we all were. It was so different to the world I left behind in
Ireland and from my upbringing.

London was a different
city then, smaller and less diverse than it is today. But it was a huge melting
pot compared to the Dublin I left behind.

I lived in a garden
flat in West Dulwich and remain firm friends with the couple who lived
upstairs. We were close to Brixton and the riots that broke out in 1981 because
of deep social and economic problems. This happened at a time when I was
already aware of the corrosive and dangerous effects of disadvantage. The views
of the girl who graduated from UCD nine years earlier with a social work degree
were evolving.

I began my career at
St Ultan’s Children’s Hospital. It was a place where a lot of people subject to
terrible disadvantage brought their children, gave birth to them and sometimes
abandoned them.

Working at St. Ultan’s
exposed me to real disadvantage for the first time.

And it made me angry.

My belief that
disadvantage and barriers to opportunity are the greatest causes of inequality
began to galvanise. Opportunity had been the defining theme of my life, and my
family’s lives. It still is

After St. Ultan’s I
got a job in the psychiatric inpatient unit in St James’s Hospital. That began
a lifelong interest in mental health, something I share with my husband
Michael, who I met at St James’s.

Places like St
Michael’s Estate, St Teresa’s Gardens and Dolphin’s Barn were in the hospital’s
catchment area. In a very depressed Dublin these were severely disadvantaged
places at the time.

Increasingly I wanted
to do something about it, to channel it somewhere.

That’s when I moved to
London, to the LSE and somewhere began to appear. I had no political ambition
at that time. I was never one of those people who wanted to be a politician as
a child.

But while I was
studying at the LSE I got involved with the National Childbirth Trust, an
organisation that campaigns to improve maternity care and for better services
for new parents. It’s still going today.

Five years later I
came home and began working as a social worker at the Mater. Ballymunwas one of
the main areas where I worked. My interest in inequality deepened. The anger
over disadvantage grew.

I began to think about
politics.

Garret Fitzgerald was
the leader of Fine Gael and I liked what he and the party stood for. I was a
committed feminist – I still am – but a practical one and cared deeply about
how women were treated in Ireland. The party’s progressive social stance and
its inclusivity on Northern Ireland and the European Union attracted me. I
wrote a letter and joined. But to be honest it didn’t go much further at that
stage.

Then I discovered the
Women’s Political Association and the Council for the Status of Women, later
the National Women’s Council.

I remember sitting at
the back of the one of the first meetings I attended thinking “what am I doing
here”?

Ultimately I became
the Chairperson for three wonderful years. Then Garret Fitzgerald came back
into my life with a bang. He was retiring and Fine Gael asked me to run for a
seat in Dublin South East in 1992. I wanted to change so much – here was my
chance.

So I became a
politician in my early forties with three young children.

The anger over
disadvantage and the belief in equality of opportunity drove me forward into
this political world.

Those same things
guide everything I do in politics to this day.

And that takes me back
to the LSE which opened its doors in 1885 and was co-founded by members of the
left-leaning Fabian society, including George Bernard Shaw. The School’s
original mission was to work for “the betterment of society,” and the School
remains committed to that goal.

We often forget when
referring to LSE that its full name is the London School of Economics &
Political Science, describing itself as one of the foremost social science
universities in the world.

LSE is associated with
the City of London - a gateway for bright students into the banking, investment
and legal worlds. However, clearly its remit and influence are much broader. At
its heart is a mission to make a positive difference to the world.

Economics are
important – very important. The economy generates the money. We know that
better than most after the last five years. This week we had a budget in which
we began to invest in services again, investment made possible by a careful
economic management.

But the economy cannot
be treated in isolation. As envisaged by LSE’s founders, an economy should work
for the betterment of society. An economy that generates resources is not an
end in itself.

What you do with those
resources is what really matters and that is how the study of social sciences
complements the study of economics.

But the problem is
that for the past thirty or forty years parts of the political centre in many
countries have focused on economic theory at the expense of social science.

The result of the
failure to incorporate social sciences into policy, and the concentration on
economic theory, has contributed to the disconnect between the political centre
and electorates.

Or to put it more
simply, focusing on how to generate the most resources in the most productive
way, without being equally as enthusiastic about how you want to use those
resources to benefit people, has ultimately led to their alienation because of
the perception that they are being left behind.

Think about it.
Nations measure their success in economic terms – national income rather than
national wellbeing.

We saw this sense of
exclusion in the recent Brexit referendum campaign. We are seeing it in the US
Presidential Campaign.

Creeping
anti-globalisation sentiment is gaining traction. That is dangerous for us. Ireland, as a small
open economy, has benefitted greatly from engagement with the wider world.

Isolated economies
lead to unhealthy societies. But it is also right to question who benefits from
globalisation and to expect that the state must be the ultimate guarantor of
the people’s best interests.

Opposing globalisation
means opposing opportunity.

Everything I have seen
in my career to date has convinced me, now more than ever, that equality of opportunity
should define this country.

Providing equality of
opportunity to everyone is how we can make this society just and fair.

It’s how we reduce
disadvantage.

It’s how we break down
the barriers to people achieving their full potential.

This week’s budget is
about creating a compassionate society in which everyone is given the
opportunity to succeed, and nobody is left behind.

It was delivered
against a backdrop of increasing uncertainty because of Brexit. The numbers are
quite astounding. Every week more than 1.2 billion euro of goods and services
are exchanged between Ireland and the UK. Under Budget 2017 measures are being
taken to make Ireland Brexit ready.

Other historical and
cultural relationships that have come to shape us as both nations and peoples.
It would be my hope that the LSE will be a contributor to the dialogue around
these current issues.

Not surprisingly, I
have found the latest budget and its negotiations something of a preoccupation
for the last while. In the midst of the post-budget analysis somebody, rather
predictably, quipped,

“If all the economists
were laid end to end, they’d never reach a conclusion”.

“Do you know who is
supposed to have said that?”

There followed some
very bad guesses. Even Chairman Mao and Lenin got a mention.

There was surprise
when I said that this witticism is attributed to no less a person than the bold
George Bernard Shaw.

So to conclude, I
believe we are at the beginning of a period of investment in social services
funded by sustainable economic growth.

Today I believe as
strongly as I did during those days in London that the state should stand for
social justice and for equality of opportunity.

It should use economic
success to improve the lives of people for the betterment of society, as the
LSE founders would have put it.

In the spirit of Shaw,
and with a special health warning to those of you who may be economists, I
therefore propose a toast.